There are indeed reasons for that Rancher to be armed. First off, if you get into trouble, it can take 911 longer than the rest of your life to get there. Pretty much you're on your own.
Secondly, I don't know if anybody's noticed or not, but it's spring and cows drop calves and sheep drop lambs this time of year, and Coyotes are everywhere. Worse still, coyotes have something in common with man-- they frequently kill for the hell of it. And the margins on running a ranch are close enough that you can't afford to lose livestock to random predation unless you want to go broke, so this time of year, if you see a coyote, out comes the SKS or whatever, (very popular as a ranch rifle) and the coyotes in question become fodder for vultures, magpies, ect.
There are places where there is a tradition of free range. Most of Nevada outside of Clark or Washoe Counties for example, still let you roam around as long as you're not damaging anything. A lot of ranchers are looking at keep out signs though, because of idiots who do things like cut locks, cut fences and shoot at water troughs. (And in a desert, shooting a water trough is actually a crime that merits hanging, even though nobody does) and sometimes livestock. In order to prevent such things, if you're working a ranch, you pack a rifle.
And it is considered good manners to ask, and if you're hunting and get lucky, a couple of cleaned birds on the way out is usually appreaciated. And I usually carry some stuff to take a few minutes to fix a downed section of fence if I find one. One makes friends that way.
The bottom line is that those young idiots who seem to have gotten a case of the vapors over a rancher with a camera and guns that happen to be his working tools in the gun rack, were handled far more gently than they probably deserved and they should be thankful rather than complaining.
And they do owe him an apology, so that little suggestion that was on their website is one that they should take to heart.
Dvorak misses something else. Frequently, good things happen in spite of the drawbacks. For the most part, right now, Africa is a welfare project for self perpetuating NGOs that put a bandaid on problems but which never, ever really deal with the root problems. And while they may have loads of good will, for the most part they end up perpetuating what has become a perpetual mess.
For the most part, those people don't have much in the way of capital and they don't have the knowledge to leverage what they have into something useful. The hope is that if they learn to read, and handle some math, they can use that computer and the web as a great big version of something that I really miss-- The Whole Earth Catalog. And that book wasn't just a list of neat stuff, it was a great way to give people ideas. And with a little luck, those African kids will look at our new modern equivalent, get an inspiration, take stock of such capital and resources that they do have access to, and maybe make their lives a little better. And if one in a hundred does that, it seems to me that the whole project has been worth the effort put into it.
I read someplace, once upon a time, that the definition of insanity was doing the same boneheaded thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. What the NGOs in Africa are doing is a lot like that. If things like the XO break that cycle, even a little bit, that's a whole lot better than what we're seeing now. In the end, like it or not, the people who are going to have to solve Africa's problems, are the Africans themselves and if those little computers help them make a move in that direction, then the whole program will have been successful.
One thing's for sure-- what's been done to date hasn't worked, because the Africans are still starving, still suffering various plagues, and still so dirt poor that the route to upper mobility is for a kid to become some dirtbag warlord's Kalashnikov Coolie. Everybody complains about it, but I see damned few people offering an alternative. Negroponte is one of the few. And instead of a bunch of static, he deserves an attaboy for that.
Contrarians like Dvorak are useful people to have around, but sometimes they're wrong and this is one of those times.
I can't disagree there. Gothe once noted that if you fight a dragon for too long, you're doomed eventually to become one. Here in the US, we've become what we were trying to overcome. And the sad irony of the situation is that few see it.
What this guy Kerr and the rest of the Bush Regime and it's merry henchmen haven't figured out yet is that the real
trick is to protect a free society without interfering with it's ability to function as one. This guy fits Mr. Justice Brandeis observation that the real encroachments on liberty come, "from men of zeal, but without understanding." This guy fits that cookie cutter perfectly-- his reach exceeds his grasp. And because that's common in government, they're fast becoming a bigger threat to the ordinary citizen than the often notional terrorists are.
The typical criminal won't home roll his Sten, but he's quite likely to buy something like a MAC or a simplified Mini-Uzi from an underground supplier and those will become available just because they're easier to make.
About 20 years ago, they used to have machinegun magazines in this country before the Volkmer-McClure Act banned new manufacture, and you had people building em from scratch as well as modifying existing guns. From time to time, I see badly xeroxed copies of those articles floating around, including one very interesting one in an old magazine called "Firepower" where they built
the old Minuteman SMG, (in the early sixties it was claimed that you could cobble one together for about seven bucks-- the bolt was interesting because it could be done entirely on a lathe without the usual milling of the cutout below the bolt face where it's cut down to accomidate the upper portion of the magazine) and they made some useful changes. My guess is that a ban would cause these to show up on the streets.
I think that our biggest problem is that the gungrabbers are trying to dictate policies about a technology that they don't understand. It's just like the current hysteria about.50 rifles. Aside from the fact that they're too expensive, they're overhyped. The reason that people like Feinstein and Blagojevich want em banned is because they can penetrate an armored limosine, which is true. What they don't realize is that they have around 75 percent chance of surviving that hit. If the shooter turns to something else like a Galitsky mine, (essentially a zipgun that shoots a big rifle grenade and set off by a MUV type pull fuze) the home-made HEAT round will kill everyone in the car, and if somebody hits the fuel cell, the fuel will mist and then explode-- like a fuel/air bomb. So by virtue of banning a weapon that's both too expensive for most people to buy and which is really not suited for shooting at a moving target, they actually decrease their personal security by turning people to more attainable weapons with a better chance of killing them. That's downright weird, but then again our political system selects for the stupidest people we can find and therefore, the stupidest people are what we get.
Just on the off chance that you're still around to check this, Ms Ford killed several of her victims. And having dodged both bullets and cars, I'd rather try dodging bullets. Usually you can find cover that will stop a bullet. Stopping six thousand pounds of car driven by a homicidal idiot is a lot harder.
As far as setting fire to the exit goes, the guy knew what the target topology was. He knew about the fire exits being chained. He also knew that the building would burn.
What I have noticed over the years is that lack of guns doesn't stop people from killing if that's what they want to do. Instead they improvise, and the improvisation is worse than what it replaced.
Take the proverbial two jerks on the motorscooter with a bomb. That's the classic drive-by attack in most of the rest of the world. Now a guy with a gun, has a certain limitation. He's firing a weapon that sends it's projectiles along a single vector. Bullets go from point a, to point b. If you get hit, most of the time, the bullet goes in a straight line. And frequently, especially in military loads like nine millimeter hardball, the bullet actually retains most of it's energy as it overpenetrates. That's a good thing for the poor guy on the recieving end. And most of the time, if you get hit, it's by accident since most people don't know how to hit a stationary target from a moving vehicle. I've done that. It's not quite what you think and it's not cut and dry.
Now compare that with a bomb. First off, it's omnidirectional. Forget finding cover, you won't have time. The bomb goes off all at once. So unless you're looking right at it and have something to drop behind, you're gonna get hit. So will almost everybody else within it's destructive radius. And it gets worse from there. The fragments are irregularly shaped and ballistically unstable. If you get hit, it's gonna have a complex woundtrack. That's hard to treat. Secondly, because they're irregularly shaped, they have a higher coefficient of resistance than a bullet does. That means that it's going to dump more energy into the target as it penetrates. That's not good. Worse still, bomb fragments tend to have more kinetic energy than a bullet does, which means not only does it dump more energy into you, but it has more energy to dump, and if you get hit, it's gonna be by multiples of fragments rather than a single fragment. That doesn't help either.
And the treatment for that really sucks. What they do is to open you up, and stretch your guts out and finger em through like you do a dog for ticks. Anything they find, the cut and resect. Surgeons call it anastomosis. The people it happens to, call it painful. You can tell when somebody's had one in the abdominal cavity. You've got a big vertical scar from sternum to pelvis. It's called a "football scar" and those who get em endured a lot of pain before, during and after they got hit.
Now given a choice between some guy with a pistol trying to do the drive-by event of the Los Angeles Tri-Athalon, (Loot, Shoot and Run) or those two guys on a motorscooter with a bomb or a Molotov cocktail, I'd much rather worry about the gun. For that matter, I'd rather they had my old service revolver instead of the underground made submachineguns that find their way into circulation when somebody imposes a ban.
A lot of stuff in the world is counter intuitive and the effects of gun bans on actual violence is at the top of the list. Even New York City where it's illegal for practical purposes to own a pistol, was estimated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to have around seven million in circulation, most of em in somebody's bedroom closet, but still there.
Laws only have their desired effect when they represent a moral consensus among those who are going to be governed by them. When they don't, they make things worse, not better.
"That is all completely bullshit, when somebody snaps and goes on a rampage, over in the USA they can reach for a gun, if they don't own one they can go and buy one without any problems. Over here the chances of them having a gun in the first place is low, and to get a gun you need to go through a months long process, by that time it would be obvious they're not mentally stable enough to own a gun."
And if you get your ban, net firepower goes up and so do the casualties. Take New York City for example where private possession of a pistol is next to impossible, legally. That should stop rampages like Virginia Tech, right? Wrong. Instead you get some loser like the one who killed some 80 plus people during the Happy Land Social Club fire. His weapon? A can of gasoline and a match. Fewer would have died if he had used a gun rather than that can of gasoline. (That's petrol to you Brits.)
I can cite other examples as well. For example there's Miss Pricilla Ford who currently inhabits a psychiatric prison about six miles from where I live called Lakes Crossing Institute For the Criminally Insane. One fine Thanksgiving day, back in 1979, if memory serves, Miss Ford, a previously upstanding member of the community, (school teacher) took her Lincoln Continental and ran over 23 people with it. And funny thing but I haven't see the hysterical among us demanding a ban on Lincoln Continentals as weapons.
Bottom line is that gun control doesn't do much more than disarm the victims while those bent on committing outrages like Virginia Tech that actually cause greater fatalities. Care to think of what might have been the case if that Korean kid had shown up with a tank of propane, a hammer and a book of matches? Dollars to donuts everybody in that wing of the building
would have been killed. Fuel Air explosions tend to produce blast overpressures over 200 pounds per square inch, which is the equivalent of a 2000 mile an hour wind. Concrete reinforced masonry buildings will fail at somewhere between 25 and 65 pounds per square inch, depending on construction and where the bomb is when it goes off. At 80 PSI, your lungs will explode.
Given a choice between a badguy with a gun who's attack I might survive, or one with a can of gasoline or the makings of a fuel air explosive, I'll take dealing with a gun armed nutcake, thank you very much! You have a chance to survive one of those, and if you're armed, you can prevent him from killing anybody. If he has the bomb or the incendary device instead, you won't get a chance. When it goes, you go. Knowing this, I'd just as soon not do things that encourage people like this to improvise, such as making guns unavailable. It's counter intuitive, but nevertheless looking at the history of gun control in the countries that have tried it, it's still true.
In the end, anytime you ban guns you actually increase the net firepower available to those who wish to commit mayhem. For example, when Marcos banned guns in the Philippines a left wing bunch of assassins nicknamed "the Beatles" took to carrying full automatic shotguns. That is to say, a shotgun that shoots like a machinegun. They got the nickname because they carried em in guitar cases. (Talk about a cliche!) Those machineguns in London are another case in point. Before the Snowdrop people got their way, the worst that a cop had to worry about was the occasional shotgun, old Webley or Enfield revolver or a war trophy Luger. Afterwords you got MAC-11 submachineguns manufactured in underground shops and the London Metropolitian Police upgrading from Heckler & Koch MP5A2s to H&K G36 assault rifles because they figured themselves to be undergunned for facing machinegun armed Yardies. (Reading about that brought some chuckles over here.)
Here's the thing that people miss. Your typical legal semiauto is limited in the damage that it can do. But since it's easier to produce submachineguns using wartime techniques like the Sten or the MAC-11 or some others, (I can make a dozen in the time that it would take me to replicate my old service revolver which is a far more complex problem manufacturing wise) you'll see more of those. You'll also see more bombings. In most places in the world, a drive by isn't some clown spray firing from a speeding automobile. Instead it's two clowns on a motorbike and the guy in the back heaves a nailbomb into the crowd. That's a lot worse. You can dodge a drive by if you keep your wits about you and they're using a gun. With a bomb, you haven't got a chance.
And it seems like the cruder the weapon, the more casualties you can produce with it. Consider the Happyland Social Club fire in New York City. Some clown with girlfriend problems kills some 80 plus people. His weapon? A can of gasoline and a book of matches. And if the two idiots at Columbine had spent more time on their bomb instead of using guns, the casualty rate would have exceeded four hundred people. They tried to use a couple of large propane tanks as the core for a fuel air explosive. Those produce blast overpressures of over 200 pounds per square inch, which is equivalent to a 2,000 mile per hour wind. (See the blast effects section of The Effects Of Nuclear Weapons, by Samuel Glasstone. Blast is blast regardless of whether it's nuclear or more or less conventional in source. It's probably the best accessible reference on blast effects available to the public.)
Bottom line here is that you can't disarm people who are intent on committing carnage, but if you don't deny them access to limited weapons like conventional firearms, they won't feel the need to upgrade to far more destructive devices. That's counter intuitive to the gun control crowd, but looking at the history of gun control elsewhere, it appears to be the way that things work.
We know there was an arrest on tbe basis of a failure to reset a clock and a hysterical, and probably incompetent Principle. The question is whether any of the kid's civil rights were violated. I'm hoping that they were, because instead of screwing around in a state court, the parents can go Federal and sue the teacher under Title 42 for violation of civil rights under color of law.
I don't know enough of the details as to whether a civil rights violation has happened or not, but if it has, that Principal, Police Department and School District might as well just sign a check and a consent order and get it over with, because if they don't, they're going to pay, and pay and pay.
BTW, odds are pretty good that the Principal won't get fired even though she appears to richly deserve it. Teachers are protected by Civil Service Laws and that makes them pretty untouchable even for instances of utter criminal stupidity like this one.
I suspect that what the ink stained wretches of the news media has been calling a diaper, is actually the fecal containment unit from a space suit. Astronauts have been running around in diapers almost since there's been space travel, simply because nobody's ever figured any other way to deal with it. Men, wear the fecal containment unit and use a condom-like device called a Texas Catheter to dispose of urine. I'm not sure, but I think that women are stuck with just the diaper. One's bad and the other's worse, but like this one pic of one of the Skylab astronauts urinating was captioned, "There ain't no graceful way."
Assuming that I'm right, the choice to wear a diaper for that 900 mile run was probably understandible, and far from being an ordinary diaper, it was probably one of the expensive NASA items that she'd have had access to as materials that she trained with. So, from that point of view, she's probably a little less weird than she appeared. People under stress tend to grasp for the familiar and since she's probably spent a lot of time in a pressure suit and had to learn to bypass a whole bunch of social and psychological survival conditioning and learn how to urinate and excrete while wearing a suit, her decision to wear a diaper for a 900 mile drive becomes understandible.
That said, however, her decision to make that drive, and attempt to kidnap her rival with a BB Gun was just downright weird. Sounds like a woman who was rather menopausal and who knew that the odds of her snagging another man was somewhere between slim and none, and with the collapse of her other relationships, this one became important enough to warrant, from her point of view, rational behavior. Objectively we see that as rather odd, but we're not in her position. That doesn't mean that we can't judge, because we can't get away from that, but we can apply a sense of proportion to some of it.
What I can't figure out is the male in that triangle. Male astronauts can usually do pretty well when it comes to attracting female eye candy, but having see the pics of both of the women involved, while they'er not ugly, neither are they anything that I'd write home about either. As pin-up material, neither should consider quitting their day job.
My biggest question though is why did the guy get involved with either of them when at least theoretically, he could have done considerably better? Instead of one candidate for the rubber gun squad, maybe we have three?
You just described the problem without realizing that you did it. If you're used to thinking in terms of imperial measurement, you can mentally estimate things. You've got a familiar frame of reference. When things get converted to Metric, it gets confusing because you don't have that internal referent. It's like when I got some xrays done a year ago. I asked the tech how much I was getting, because I keep mental track of that because going to different doctors, I can't always be sure that everybody's gotten a look at my chart and knows how much of a dose I've had over the last year. So, I tend to think in terms of rads or other old familiar units of measurement. When I got a figure in Milisieverts, that told me worse than nothing, because I was quoted a unit of measurement that I couldn't relate to anything at all.
And that effects other things as well. If you're working on equipment that's on the old National Standard or even the old British Imperial Measure, (a Woolrich thread on a screw has a different pitch than a US equivalent, and that's just one example) jumping back and forth between systems is asking for it.
The thing that you've missed, over all, is that the US National Standard System which derived from the old British Imperial Measure, is a system. Lots of people hold it in common. Technical standards based on that system are what you're dealing with whether it's a complex machining job or the blueprints for your house. And getting the kind of confusion that NASA had when they lost that satellite because of a confusion in systems of measurement, can be both expensive and in some cases deadly.
Sooner or later the US will change over, but it will be from economic pressure rather than political mandates. But it's not going to happen overnight as much as you'd like it to. Figure about a century, simply because manufacturing has shifted. The US is a technological power but no longer an industrial one, and China has become the preeminent industrial power on the planet. They make most goods and when you're buying, especially on the basis of cost, you buy Chinese and the Chinese use metric. But that's going to be a slow conversion and mandating it from on high will cause you and everybody else, no end of grief.
Tanks are fairly easy to kill in an urban setting. You just have to know how. As far as automatic weapons go, those are nice if you're out in the open with an enemy out in the open, and you want to create a beaten fire zone. Aside from that, full auto is of marginal usefulness.
In an urban guerilla setting, where you don't have a uniformed enemy, semiautomatic and bolt action rifles are a better pick, not only because you're less likely to be located while you're taking out whomever is on the other side, but also because of logistics. After Vietnam, the US Army did a study which found that in a single firefight, those who carry selective fire weapons would dump about 60 percent of their basic load. If you're subsisting on captures, that puts you in a critical status as far as each individual unit of fire is concerned. In contrast, aimed fire is better, because you're not dumping 60 percent of your load. BTW, if you study any history at all, you'll find that the most successful guerilla leader in US history, Col. Wendell Fertig, who commanded the Mindanao Guerilla, would only send his guys out raiding with ten rounds a piece. His reasoning that by keeping em short on ammo, that they'd shoot some Japanese, collect their spent cartridges for reloading and bug out rather than trying to contest the Japanese for ownership of ground. And along with Aaron Bank, Wendell Fertig was one of the original authors of US Special Forces doctrine.
BTW, don't try the "How many helicopters do you have?" arguement. The question isn't how many a guerilla has, but rather how many can he knock down, and in the real world, shooting down helicopters isn't all that hard. (Just as a thought, go find an old Atlantic Monthly article by Craig Estabrook called "All Aboard Air Oblivion." You can read about the book keeping cheats that the Army used to cover up the actual number of losses in Vietnam as regards rotary winged aircraft.
Actually Sir, you're missing a few small points. To start with a lot of gun control started with Jim Crow. During the Reconstruction period, a lot of states passed gun control laws to keep them out of the hands of blacks. And a lot of that goes to this day. Ever wonder where the term "Saturday Night Special" came from? It came from a very nasty old racist song that was titled, "Niggertown Saturday Night", and the term itself was coined by the late Howard Metzenbaum, a strong proponent of gun confiscation. So much for history.
And as far as DC's "Democratically" passed gun ban goes, that one doesn't hold water either. The idea behind our Constitution is that law protects the majority and rights the minority. The idea of a majority being able to infringe of the rights of the minority, is antithetical to the entire system that we are supposed to have here. In the end, if you claim that a 51 percent majority constitutes a moral consensus and imperative concerning the meaning of rights as recognized, but not granted by our Constitution, you wind up with Ben Franklin's definition of Democracy as "Three Wolves and a Sheep", voting on whom to have for dinner.
You might also want to consider the fact that in a precident driven legal system, any precident can be universally applied, even if the situation in one case is not comparable to the case in which the precident was generated. That means in plain English that, "That which you can do to anybody, you can do to everybody". So the precident of being able to eliminate a right from the Constitution by simple majority vote in a legislative context, means that any other rights you have may be gutted, reinterpreted, or simply ignored in the same fashion.
So, while you're mulling that one over, I'm going to ask you the same question I've been asking gungrabbers for the last 35 some odd years now. I've gotten exactly two honest answers to that question in that time. Everybody else either danced around it, made excuses as to why they couldn't answer it or just flat ignored it and hoped that it would go away. So here's your turn in the barrel.
The question is this: "Assuming that by legislation you could get a comprehensive gun control law, which other Constitutional Rights are you prepared to surrender in order to make this enforcable?"
For that matter, I'd be seriously curious to know as to whether you'd be willing to allow the mechanism that you claim invalidates the rights of individuals to possess guns, invalidate other rights that you hold too, such as free speech, due process, ect.
Before you answer that question, let me offer you two points to predicate your answer on. First off, I invite you to read the text of United States vs Miller. The judicial reasoning in that decision clearly held that an individual has the right to possess military weapons. They predicated their finding for the Government on the claim that nobody had shown that a sawed off shotgun bore any relationship to the preservation of a "well regulated militia." In Miller, the only briefs presented were those by the Solicitor General of the United States. Miller was dead and because of a requirement that briefs before the Supreme Court be printed instead of typed, Miller's attorney decided to not show up for the hearing. In essence the Government won by acquiesence of non-negation. It is, by the way, historically demonstrable that a sawed off shotgun really does have a military application.
The second thing that I'd like to call your attention to, is the fact that a civilian resistance is a military action. And contrary to popular belief, the workaday weapons of a civilian resistance are not assault rifles, but rather are pistols, because they're concealable and more adaptable to the missions that a civilian resistance engages in, such as protective cover for clandestine meetings. (If you can find a copy of Total Resistance, by Major H. Von Dach, of Berne Canton, which was reprinted in the US by Paladin Press, you'll find examples of the use of pistols in a civilian resistance. There are others as well.)
F
I don't like the safety problems with this weapon either. A lot of the old guys who used to align waveguides for microwave systems by eye, ended up coming down with cataracts down the road. That millimeter wave radiation is going to heat the vitrious humor as well as the water present in other eye tissues. So while this weapon may well be technically non-lethal, who's going to take responsibility for a whole bunch of people being blinded sooner or later down the road.
Last I heard, the limit for RF energy density was 100mw per square centimeter, and some people considered that too high. So, I think that this weapon is a bad idea and using it will cause a lot of blowback in the future.
Somebody might want to test the old weapons too, once they find out that these things are dangerous.
They're talking about using a high powered microwave transmitter to cause pain, by heating the area
where the nerve endings are under the skin. Unfortunately, it also heats the vitrious humor of the
eye, and does damage. Don't believe it? Go find one of the old guys who used to align microwave wave
guides by eyeball. Most of them are being treated for cataracts.
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There are indeed reasons for that Rancher to be armed. First off, if you get into trouble, it can take 911 longer than the rest of your life to get there. Pretty much you're on your own. Secondly, I don't know if anybody's noticed or not, but it's spring and cows drop calves and sheep drop lambs this time of year, and Coyotes are everywhere. Worse still, coyotes have something in common with man-- they frequently kill for the hell of it. And the margins on running a ranch are close enough that you can't afford to lose livestock to random predation unless you want to go broke, so this time of year, if you see a coyote, out comes the SKS or whatever, (very popular as a ranch rifle) and the coyotes in question become fodder for vultures, magpies, ect. There are places where there is a tradition of free range. Most of Nevada outside of Clark or Washoe Counties for example, still let you roam around as long as you're not damaging anything. A lot of ranchers are looking at keep out signs though, because of idiots who do things like cut locks, cut fences and shoot at water troughs. (And in a desert, shooting a water trough is actually a crime that merits hanging, even though nobody does) and sometimes livestock. In order to prevent such things, if you're working a ranch, you pack a rifle. And it is considered good manners to ask, and if you're hunting and get lucky, a couple of cleaned birds on the way out is usually appreaciated. And I usually carry some stuff to take a few minutes to fix a downed section of fence if I find one. One makes friends that way. The bottom line is that those young idiots who seem to have gotten a case of the vapors over a rancher with a camera and guns that happen to be his working tools in the gun rack, were handled far more gently than they probably deserved and they should be thankful rather than complaining. And they do owe him an apology, so that little suggestion that was on their website is one that they should take to heart.
Dvorak misses something else. Frequently, good things happen in spite of the drawbacks. For the most part, right now, Africa is a welfare project for self perpetuating NGOs that put a bandaid on problems but which never, ever really deal with the root problems. And while they may have loads of good will, for the most part they end up perpetuating what has become a perpetual mess.
For the most part, those people don't have much in the way of capital and they don't have the knowledge to leverage what they have into something useful. The hope is that if they learn to read, and handle some math, they can use that computer and the web as a great big version of something that I really miss-- The Whole Earth Catalog. And that book wasn't just a list of neat stuff, it was a great way to give people ideas. And with a little luck, those African kids will look at our new modern equivalent, get an inspiration, take stock of such capital and resources that they do have access to, and maybe make their lives a little better. And if one in a hundred does that, it seems to me that the whole project has been worth the effort put into it.
I read someplace, once upon a time, that the definition of insanity was doing the same boneheaded thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. What the NGOs in Africa are doing is a lot like that. If things like the XO break that cycle, even a little bit,
that's a whole lot better than what we're seeing now. In the end, like it or not, the people who are going to have to solve Africa's problems, are the Africans themselves and if those little computers help them make a move in that direction, then the whole program will have been successful.
One thing's for sure-- what's been done to date hasn't worked, because the Africans are still starving, still suffering various plagues, and still so dirt poor that the route to upper mobility is for a kid to become some dirtbag warlord's Kalashnikov Coolie. Everybody complains about it, but I see damned few people offering an alternative. Negroponte is one of the few. And instead of a bunch of static, he deserves an attaboy for that.
Contrarians like Dvorak are useful people to have around, but sometimes they're wrong and this is one of those times.
I can't disagree there. Gothe once noted that if you fight a dragon for too long, you're doomed eventually to become one. Here in the US, we've become what we were trying to overcome. And the sad irony of the situation is that few see it.
What this guy Kerr and the rest of the Bush Regime and it's merry henchmen haven't figured out yet is that the real trick is to protect a free society without interfering with it's ability to function as one. This guy fits Mr. Justice Brandeis observation that the real encroachments on liberty come, "from men of zeal, but without understanding." This guy fits that cookie cutter perfectly-- his reach exceeds his grasp. And because that's common in government, they're fast becoming a bigger threat to the ordinary citizen than the often notional terrorists are.
The typical criminal won't home roll his Sten, but he's quite likely to buy something like a MAC or a simplified Mini-Uzi from an underground supplier and those will become available just because they're easier to make. About 20 years ago, they used to have machinegun magazines in this country before the Volkmer-McClure Act banned new manufacture, and you had people building em from scratch as well as modifying existing guns. From time to time, I see badly xeroxed copies of those articles floating around, including one very interesting one in an old magazine called "Firepower" where they built the old Minuteman SMG, (in the early sixties it was claimed that you could cobble one together for about seven bucks-- the bolt was interesting because it could be done entirely on a lathe without the usual milling of the cutout below the bolt face where it's cut down to accomidate the upper portion of the magazine) and they made some useful changes. My guess is that a ban would cause these to show up on the streets. I think that our biggest problem is that the gungrabbers are trying to dictate policies about a technology that they don't understand. It's just like the current hysteria about .50 rifles. Aside from the fact that they're too expensive, they're overhyped. The reason that people like Feinstein and Blagojevich want em banned is because they can penetrate an armored limosine, which is true. What they don't realize is that they have around 75 percent chance of surviving that hit. If the shooter turns to something else like a Galitsky mine, (essentially a zipgun that shoots a big rifle grenade and set off by a MUV type pull fuze) the home-made HEAT round will kill everyone in the car, and if somebody hits the fuel cell, the fuel will mist and then explode-- like a fuel/air bomb. So by virtue of banning a weapon that's both too expensive for most people to buy and which is really not suited for shooting at a moving target, they actually decrease their personal security by turning people to more attainable weapons with a better chance of killing them. That's downright weird, but then again our political system selects for the stupidest people we can find and therefore, the stupidest people are what we get.
Just on the off chance that you're still around to check this, Ms Ford killed several of her victims. And having dodged both bullets and cars, I'd rather try dodging bullets. Usually you
can find cover that will stop a bullet. Stopping six thousand pounds of car driven by a homicidal
idiot is a lot harder.
As far as setting fire to the exit goes, the guy knew what the target topology was. He knew about the fire exits being chained. He also knew that the building would burn.
What I have noticed over the years is that lack of guns doesn't stop people from killing if that's what they want to do. Instead they improvise, and the improvisation is worse than what it replaced.
Take the proverbial two jerks on the motorscooter with a bomb. That's the classic drive-by attack in most of the rest of the world. Now a guy with a gun, has a certain limitation. He's firing a weapon that sends it's projectiles along a single vector. Bullets go from point a, to point b. If you get hit, most of the time, the bullet goes in a straight line. And frequently, especially in military loads like nine millimeter hardball, the bullet actually retains most of it's energy as it overpenetrates. That's a good thing for the poor guy on the recieving end. And most of the time, if
you get hit, it's by accident since most people don't know how to hit a stationary target from a moving vehicle. I've done that. It's not quite what you think and it's not cut and dry.
Now compare that with a bomb. First off, it's omnidirectional. Forget finding cover, you won't have
time. The bomb goes off all at once. So unless you're looking right at it and have something to drop behind, you're gonna get hit. So will almost everybody else within it's destructive radius. And it gets worse from there. The fragments are irregularly shaped and ballistically unstable. If you get hit, it's gonna have a complex woundtrack. That's hard to treat. Secondly, because they're irregularly shaped, they have a higher coefficient of resistance than a bullet does. That means that it's going to dump more energy into the target as it penetrates. That's not good. Worse still, bomb fragments tend to have more kinetic energy than a bullet does, which means not only does it dump more energy into you, but it has more energy to dump, and if you get hit, it's gonna be by multiples of fragments rather than a single fragment. That doesn't help either.
And the treatment for that really sucks. What they do is to open you up, and stretch your guts out
and finger em through like you do a dog for ticks. Anything they find, the cut and resect. Surgeons call it anastomosis. The people it happens to, call it painful. You can tell when somebody's had one in the abdominal cavity. You've got a big vertical scar from sternum to pelvis. It's called a "football scar" and those who get em endured a lot of pain before, during and after they got hit.
Now given a choice between some guy with a pistol trying to do the drive-by event of the Los Angeles Tri-Athalon, (Loot, Shoot and Run) or those two guys on a motorscooter with a bomb or a Molotov cocktail, I'd much rather worry about the gun. For that matter, I'd rather they had my old service revolver instead of the underground made submachineguns that find their way into circulation when somebody imposes a ban.
A lot of stuff in the world is counter intuitive and the effects of gun bans on actual violence is at the top of the list. Even New York City where it's illegal for practical purposes to own a pistol, was estimated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to have around seven million in circulation, most of em in somebody's bedroom closet, but still there.
Laws only have their desired effect when they represent a moral consensus among those who are going to be governed by them. When they don't, they make things worse, not better.
"That is all completely bullshit, when somebody snaps and goes on a rampage, over in the USA they can reach for a gun, if they don't own one they can go and buy one without any problems. Over here the chances of them having a gun in the first place is low, and to get a gun you need to go through a months long process, by that time it would be obvious they're not mentally stable enough to own a gun." And if you get your ban, net firepower goes up and so do the casualties. Take New York City for example where private possession of a pistol is next to impossible, legally. That should stop rampages like Virginia Tech, right? Wrong. Instead you get some loser like the one who killed some 80 plus people during the Happy Land Social Club fire. His weapon? A can of gasoline and a match. Fewer would have died if he had used a gun rather than that can of gasoline. (That's petrol to you Brits.) I can cite other examples as well. For example there's Miss Pricilla Ford who currently inhabits a psychiatric prison about six miles from where I live called Lakes Crossing Institute For the Criminally Insane. One fine Thanksgiving day, back in 1979, if memory serves, Miss Ford, a previously upstanding member of the community, (school teacher) took her Lincoln Continental and ran over 23 people with it. And funny thing but I haven't see the hysterical among us demanding a ban on Lincoln Continentals as weapons. Bottom line is that gun control doesn't do much more than disarm the victims while those bent on committing outrages like Virginia Tech that actually cause greater fatalities. Care to think of what might have been the case if that Korean kid had shown up with a tank of propane, a hammer and a book of matches? Dollars to donuts everybody in that wing of the building would have been killed. Fuel Air explosions tend to produce blast overpressures over 200 pounds per square inch, which is the equivalent of a 2000 mile an hour wind. Concrete reinforced masonry buildings will fail at somewhere between 25 and 65 pounds per square inch, depending on construction and where the bomb is when it goes off. At 80 PSI, your lungs will explode. Given a choice between a badguy with a gun who's attack I might survive, or one with a can of gasoline or the makings of a fuel air explosive, I'll take dealing with a gun armed nutcake, thank you very much! You have a chance to survive one of those, and if you're armed, you can prevent him from killing anybody. If he has the bomb or the incendary device instead, you won't get a chance. When it goes, you go. Knowing this, I'd just as soon not do things that encourage people like this to improvise, such as making guns unavailable. It's counter intuitive, but nevertheless looking at the history of gun control in the countries that have tried it, it's still true.
In the end, anytime you ban guns you actually increase the net firepower available to those who wish to commit mayhem. For example, when Marcos banned guns in the Philippines a left wing bunch of assassins nicknamed "the Beatles" took to carrying full automatic shotguns. That is to say, a shotgun that shoots like a machinegun. They got the nickname because they carried em in guitar cases. (Talk about a cliche!) Those machineguns in London are another case in point. Before the Snowdrop people got their way, the worst that a cop had to worry about was the occasional shotgun, old Webley or Enfield revolver or a war trophy Luger.
Afterwords you got MAC-11 submachineguns manufactured in underground shops and the London Metropolitian Police upgrading from Heckler & Koch MP5A2s to H&K G36 assault rifles because they figured themselves to be undergunned for facing machinegun armed Yardies. (Reading about that brought some chuckles over here.)
Here's the thing that people miss. Your typical legal semiauto is limited in the damage that it can do. But since it's easier to produce submachineguns using wartime techniques like the Sten or the MAC-11 or some others, (I can make a dozen in the time that it would take me to replicate my old service revolver which is a far more complex problem manufacturing wise) you'll see more of those. You'll also see more bombings. In most places in the world, a drive by isn't some clown spray firing from a speeding automobile. Instead it's two clowns on a motorbike and the guy in the back heaves a nailbomb into the crowd. That's a lot worse. You can dodge a drive by if you keep your wits about you and they're using a gun. With a bomb, you haven't got a chance.
And it seems like the cruder the weapon, the more casualties you can produce with it. Consider the Happyland Social Club fire in New York City. Some clown with girlfriend problems kills some 80 plus people. His weapon? A can of gasoline and a book of matches. And if the two idiots at Columbine had spent more time on their bomb instead of using guns, the casualty rate would have exceeded four hundred people. They tried to use a couple of large propane tanks as the core for a fuel air explosive. Those produce blast overpressures of over 200 pounds per square inch, which is equivalent to a 2,000 mile per hour wind. (See the blast effects section of The Effects Of Nuclear Weapons, by Samuel Glasstone. Blast is blast regardless of whether it's nuclear
or more or less conventional in source. It's probably the best accessible reference on blast effects available to the public.)
Bottom line here is that you can't disarm people who are intent on committing carnage, but if you don't deny them access to limited weapons like conventional firearms, they won't feel the need to upgrade to far more destructive devices. That's counter intuitive to the gun control crowd, but looking at the history of gun control elsewhere, it appears to be the way that things work.
We know there was an arrest on tbe basis of a failure to reset a clock and a hysterical,
and probably incompetent Principle. The question is whether any of the kid's civil rights
were violated. I'm hoping that they were, because instead of screwing around in a state court, the parents can go Federal and sue the teacher under Title 42 for violation of civil rights under color of law.
I don't know enough of the details as to whether a civil rights violation has happened or not, but if it has, that Principal, Police Department and School District might as well just sign a check and a consent order and get it over with, because if they don't,
they're going to pay, and pay and pay.
BTW, odds are pretty good that the Principal won't get fired even though she appears to richly deserve it. Teachers are protected by Civil Service Laws and that makes them pretty untouchable even for instances of utter criminal stupidity like this one.
I suspect that what the ink stained wretches of the news media has
been calling a diaper, is actually the fecal containment unit from
a space suit. Astronauts have been running around in diapers almost
since there's been space travel, simply because nobody's ever
figured any other way to deal with it. Men, wear the fecal containment
unit and use a condom-like device called a Texas Catheter to dispose of
urine. I'm not sure, but I think that women are stuck with just the diaper.
One's bad and the other's worse, but like this one pic of one of the Skylab
astronauts urinating was captioned, "There ain't no graceful way."
Assuming that I'm right, the choice to wear a diaper for that 900 mile run
was probably understandible, and far from being an ordinary diaper, it was
probably one of the expensive NASA items that she'd have had access to as
materials that she trained with. So, from that point of view, she's probably
a little less weird than she appeared. People under stress tend to grasp for
the familiar and since she's probably spent a lot of time in a pressure suit
and had to learn to bypass a whole bunch of social and psychological survival
conditioning and learn how to urinate and excrete while wearing a suit, her
decision to wear a diaper for a 900 mile drive becomes understandible.
That said, however, her decision to make that drive, and attempt to kidnap her
rival with a BB Gun was just downright weird. Sounds like a woman who was rather
menopausal and who knew that the odds of her snagging another man was somewhere
between slim and none, and with the collapse of her other relationships, this
one became important enough to warrant, from her point of view, rational behavior.
Objectively we see that as rather odd, but we're not in her position. That doesn't
mean that we can't judge, because we can't get away from that, but we can apply
a sense of proportion to some of it.
What I can't figure out is the male in that triangle. Male astronauts can usually
do pretty well when it comes to attracting female eye candy, but having see the
pics of both of the women involved, while they'er not ugly, neither are they
anything that I'd write home about either. As pin-up material, neither should
consider quitting their day job.
My biggest question though is why did the guy get involved with either of them when
at least theoretically, he could have done considerably better? Instead of one
candidate for the rubber gun squad, maybe we have three?
You just described the problem without realizing that you did it. If you're used to thinking in terms of imperial measurement, you can mentally estimate things. You've got a familiar frame of reference.
When things get converted to Metric, it gets confusing because you don't have that internal referent.
It's like when I got some xrays done a year ago. I asked the tech how much I was getting, because I keep mental track of that because going to different doctors, I can't always be sure that everybody's
gotten a look at my chart and knows how much of a dose I've had over the last year. So, I tend to think in terms of rads or other old familiar units of measurement. When I got a figure in Milisieverts, that told me worse than nothing, because I was quoted a unit of measurement that I couldn't relate to anything at all.
And that effects other things as well. If you're working on equipment that's on the old National Standard or even the old British Imperial Measure, (a Woolrich thread on a screw has a different pitch than a US equivalent, and that's just one example) jumping back and forth between systems is asking for it.
The thing that you've missed, over all, is that the US National Standard System which derived from the old British Imperial Measure, is a system. Lots of people hold it in common. Technical standards based on that system are what you're dealing with whether it's a complex machining job or the blueprints for your house. And getting the kind of confusion that NASA had when they lost that satellite because of a confusion in systems of measurement, can be both expensive and in some cases deadly.
Sooner or later the US will change over, but it will be from economic pressure rather than political mandates. But it's not going to happen overnight as much as you'd like it to. Figure about a century,
simply because manufacturing has shifted. The US is a technological power but no longer an industrial one, and China has become the preeminent industrial power on the planet. They make most goods and when you're buying, especially on the basis of cost, you buy Chinese and the Chinese use metric. But that's going to be a slow conversion and mandating it from on high will cause you and everybody else, no end of grief.
Tanks are fairly easy to kill in an urban setting. You just have to know how. As far as automatic weapons go, those are nice if you're out in the open with an enemy out in the open, and you want to create a beaten fire zone. Aside from that, full auto is of marginal usefulness. In an urban guerilla setting, where you don't have a uniformed enemy, semiautomatic and bolt action rifles are a better pick, not only because you're less likely to be located while you're taking out whomever is on the other side, but also because of logistics. After Vietnam, the US Army did a study which found that in a single firefight, those who carry selective fire weapons would dump about 60 percent of their basic load. If you're subsisting on captures, that puts you in a critical status as far as each individual unit of fire is concerned. In contrast, aimed fire is better, because you're not dumping 60 percent of your load. BTW, if you study any history at all, you'll find that the most successful guerilla leader in US history, Col. Wendell Fertig, who commanded the Mindanao Guerilla, would only send his guys out raiding with ten rounds a piece. His reasoning that by keeping em short on ammo, that they'd shoot some Japanese, collect their spent cartridges for reloading and bug out rather than trying to contest the Japanese for ownership of ground. And along with Aaron Bank, Wendell Fertig was one of the original authors of US Special Forces doctrine. BTW, don't try the "How many helicopters do you have?" arguement. The question isn't how many a guerilla has, but rather how many can he knock down, and in the real world, shooting down helicopters isn't all that hard. (Just as a thought, go find an old Atlantic Monthly article by Craig Estabrook called "All Aboard Air Oblivion." You can read about the book keeping cheats that the Army used to cover up the actual number of losses in Vietnam as regards rotary winged aircraft.
Actually Sir, you're missing a few small points. To start with a lot of gun control started with Jim Crow. During the Reconstruction period, a lot of states passed gun control laws to keep them out of the hands of blacks. And a lot of that goes to this day. Ever wonder where the term "Saturday Night Special" came from? It came from a very nasty old racist song that was titled, "Niggertown Saturday Night", and the term itself was coined by the late Howard Metzenbaum, a strong proponent of gun confiscation. So much for history. And as far as DC's "Democratically" passed gun ban goes, that one doesn't hold water either. The idea behind our Constitution is that law protects the majority and rights the minority. The idea of a majority being able to infringe of the rights of the minority, is antithetical to the entire system that we are supposed to have here. In the end, if you claim that a 51 percent majority constitutes a moral consensus and imperative concerning the meaning of rights as recognized, but not granted by our Constitution, you wind up with Ben Franklin's definition of Democracy as "Three Wolves and a Sheep", voting on whom to have for dinner. You might also want to consider the fact that in a precident driven legal system, any precident can be universally applied, even if the situation in one case is not comparable to the case in which the precident was generated. That means in plain English that, "That which you can do to anybody, you can do to everybody". So the precident of being able to eliminate a right from the Constitution by simple majority vote in a legislative context, means that any other rights you have may be gutted, reinterpreted, or simply ignored in the same fashion. So, while you're mulling that one over, I'm going to ask you the same question I've been asking gungrabbers for the last 35 some odd years now. I've gotten exactly two honest answers to that question in that time. Everybody else either danced around it, made excuses as to why they couldn't answer it or just flat ignored it and hoped that it would go away. So here's your turn in the barrel. The question is this: "Assuming that by legislation you could get a comprehensive gun control law, which other Constitutional Rights are you prepared to surrender in order to make this enforcable?" For that matter, I'd be seriously curious to know as to whether you'd be willing to allow the mechanism that you claim invalidates the rights of individuals to possess guns, invalidate other rights that you hold too, such as free speech, due process, ect. Before you answer that question, let me offer you two points to predicate your answer on. First off, I invite you to read the text of United States vs Miller. The judicial reasoning in that decision clearly held that an individual has the right to possess military weapons. They predicated their finding for the Government on the claim that nobody had shown that a sawed off shotgun bore any relationship to the preservation of a "well regulated militia." In Miller, the only briefs presented were those by the Solicitor General of the United States. Miller was dead and because of a requirement that briefs before the Supreme Court be printed instead of typed, Miller's attorney decided to not show up for the hearing. In essence the Government won by acquiesence of non-negation. It is, by the way, historically demonstrable that a sawed off shotgun really does have a military application. The second thing that I'd like to call your attention to, is the fact that a civilian resistance is a military action. And contrary to popular belief, the workaday weapons of a civilian resistance are not assault rifles, but rather are pistols, because they're concealable and more adaptable to the missions that a civilian resistance engages in, such as protective cover for clandestine meetings. (If you can find a copy of Total Resistance, by Major H. Von Dach, of Berne Canton, which was reprinted in the US by Paladin Press, you'll find examples of the use of pistols in a civilian resistance. There are others as well.) F
I don't like the safety problems with this weapon either. A lot of the old guys who used to align waveguides for microwave systems by eye, ended up coming down with cataracts down the road. That millimeter wave radiation is going to heat the vitrious humor as well as the water present in other eye tissues. So while this weapon may well be technically non-lethal, who's going to take responsibility for a whole bunch of people being blinded sooner or later down the road. Last I heard, the limit for RF energy density was 100mw per square centimeter, and some people considered that too high. So, I think that this weapon is a bad idea and using it will cause a lot of blowback in the future.
Somebody might want to test the old weapons too, once they find out that these things are dangerous. They're talking about using a high powered microwave transmitter to cause pain, by heating the area where the nerve endings are under the skin. Unfortunately, it also heats the vitrious humor of the eye, and does damage. Don't believe it? Go find one of the old guys who used to align microwave wave guides by eyeball. Most of them are being treated for cataracts.